German Brewers Lobby Against Fracking

The Atlantic:

Fracking opponents have come up with plenty of interesting arguments against the practice, but perhaps the most compelling yet comes just this week from Germany: Blast apart our soil, the German Brewers Federation told the federal government, and you risk befouling our national beverage.
Brewing the world's best hefeweizen, you see, requires great drinking water -- and fracking, they said, "could reduce or even completely eliminate the security of the water supply." In a letter, the organization argued that this newfangled way of extracting energy would conflict with Europe's oldest food purity law, the Reinheitsgebot of 1516, which stated, "We wish to emphasize that in future in all cities, markets and in the country, the only ingredients used for the brewing of beer must be barley, hops and water."
Nasty fracking wastewater, they say, is not on that list.
Germany is Europe's biggest beer producer and has the continent's third-largest per-capita consumption, after the Czech Republic and Austria. So perhaps Big Beer is indeed the best-positioned group to pressure the government of Angela Merkel, who is currently attempting to draft up fracking regulations that would allow the exploration of Germany's untapped natural gas reserves without harming the environment.

Considering how much more dependent on natural gas imports they are than we are, I am surprised we are so much further ahead of them on fracking.  Outside of energy, we generally trail the Europeans on technology adoption. At least on the construction side.